Underwater vision enhancement technologies: a comprehensive review, challenges, and recent trends

Cameras are integrated with various underwater vision systems for underwater object detection and marine biological monitoring. However, underwater images captured by cameras rarely achieve the desired visual quality, which may affect their further applications. Various underwater vision enhancement technologies have been proposed to improve the visual quality of underwater images in the past few decades, which is the focus of this paper. Specifically, we review the theory of underwater image degradations and the underwater image formation models. Meanwhile, this review summarizes various underwater vision enhancement technologies and reports the existing underwater image datasets. Further, we conduct extensive and systematic experiments to explore the limitations and superiority of various underwater vision enhancement methods. Finally, the recent trends and challenges of underwater vision enhancement are discussed. We wish this paper could serve as a reference source for future study and promote the development of this research field.